foilholio wrote:Yes because artificially raising prices equals value and people love haggling. puke!
You misunderstand his point...if they were to authorize dealers to sell new-old-stock at super low prices, everyone out there trying to sell a used Flysurfer kite would have to compete against the discounted price point of that new-old-stock from retailers. By not deeply discounting "clearance" merchandise, they are protecting kite owners from a significant loss in value of their purchase.
Example:
You pay $2200 for a brand new FS kite. 2 years later you try to sell it for $1500 only to find out that the same exact kite now sells brand-new for $1600. You now have to discount your kite way below "fair market value" because the manufacturer cleared out a huge amount of their stock through a bulk discount.
This exact thing happened with Spotz foils recently...they put all their Spotz 2's on deep discount and sold them for $1200 in anticipation of the new Spotz 3 Tuna being released. Now nobody can sell their used Spotz 2 for more than $1200 bucks because that's the latest "brand new" price set by the manufacturer. It deepens the discount Spotz 2 owners are forced to offer customers to sell their used gear.
This is Flysurfer's way of saying, "we'd rather have unsold full-price inventory at our distributors than flood the used market with deeply discounted new-old-stock."
The other thing that happens if they authorize deep discounts on outdated models is that the new stuff won't sell well. For example:
If you assume a new-old-stock 2014 Speed 4 goes for $1600 (making that number up) during a manufacturer's clearance, the brand new 2016 Speed 5 that goes for $2400 will never sell. If the new kite is 10% better than the old one but it's 33% more expensive, nobody is going to buy it. If the new kite is 10% better than the old kite and it's 5% more expensive, it'll sell great! I recognize that it's super hard to quantify improvement of a kite from model year to model year in terms of "% of quality improvement" but I hope you get the point...things have to sell for a reasonable price or else the whole pricing model implodes and the brand can end up in serious trouble in terms of revenue and cash flow. This is business 101 type stuff and unfortunately for the consumer, we have to keep Flysurfer in business or else they'll stop making the kites we all know and love
This also highlights the inherent value of kite businesses doing manufacturer-to-consumer direct sales without a distribution network in place. If the kite designer can just ship direct to the customer from their manufacturing location, they cut out all the variability of their pricing model and can also drive the business towards more of a "just in time" supply model to reduce overhead and stocking fees to keep inventory in the hands of their distributors. The typical complaint of this business model is that customer service goes down because the manufacturer is handling the sales and customer support side of things. A big advantage of this business model is cheaper kites and more direct communication between the designer/manufacturer and the customer; if a company scales their business model correctly, this is a huge win because they can incorporate customer feedback and complaints into their product development efforts more directly and hopefully match their product offering to what the market demands more accurately.